of Almighty God. There was no other way to meet devils without destroying them. In this way only could He become their rescuer or Redeemer.
The enemy of the human race was the underworld. In this way of human birth, "the seed of the woman would bruise the serpent's head." and the "serpent," or the collective power of evil in its malignity, "would bruise his heel." The seed of the woman was the Divine Truth embodied in a human being, the son of Mary. The Seed of the serpent was self-love. Beguiled by the senses, the celestial being of Eden, set up self-love and the pride of self-intelligence in the center of the Garden instead of the acknowledgment of God, which was the tree of life, as the source of life and happiness.
The promise to the man in Eden of a final rescue became the guiding principle of history. It was the promise of at-one-ment with God which was to be worked out in the history of the world. The story of the Bible is therefore the story of the fall of man by listening to the self-life, in time being brought back to oneness with the Divine through the work of a Human-Divine Redeemer, the seed of the woman.
Into a world almost lost came Jesus "God-in-Crist," "the Only-Begotten Son of God," bringing the otherwise unseeable and unknowable God into manifestation, so that God could fight against man's enemies of the underworld in this assumed and limited humanity on the plane of man's life.
This was the situation which brought Jesus into the world as the promised Messiah of the Jews, but really as the Deliverer of all mankind from the hells. All the promises of the Old Testament point to this deliverance. And there was to be but one Redeemer and Saviour, the son horn of the Virgin, God-with-us, "The Mighty God. the Everlasting Father." God in human form, "in whom dwelt all the fulness of the Godhead." As Jesus said, "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father . . . The Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works." "I and the Father are one."
